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Part three in a series: How are other Canadian cities dealing with homelessness?

Toronto - Two young boys watch as a large group of police officers search the area around a housing complex on Sheppard Avenue near Jane following a fatal shooting, Tues., Aug. 30, 2005.

Photograph by: Tyler Anderson
, National Post

Gun violence that shattered the peace and rattled city officials in Toronto 10 years ago erupted in poor suburban communities, not in the downtown core.

Municipal planners studied the problem, and determined young gangs were forming in areas that offered few resources to keep teens from impoverished families safe.

Unlike Vancouver, where the majority of low-income housing is clumped in the Downtown Eastside, Toronto’s social housing was funded by the federal government several decades ago and spread out in neighbourhoods across the city.

“There is no equivalent to East Hastings in Toronto,” said Chris Brillinger, Toronto’s executive director of social development, finance and administration.

But there were few social agencies and resources for the poor near these buildings, until the city developed a strategy in 2005 to create “strong neighbourhoods” — a so-called “placed-based” approach that brings services to where people live, said Brillinger.

Researchers continue to measure the health and happiness of people living in these areas, but the strategy has reduced crime and improved living conditions in many areas.

This trendy place-based strategy is not a solution to homelessness, which is typically rooted in systemic issues such as racism and unemployment, Brillinger noted. “But we need to make neighbourhoods as strong as we possibly can, as resilient as we can possibly make them, to mitigate those impacts,” he added.

The Vancouver Sun spent weeks figuring out how many agencies are operating in the Downtown Eastside — and discovered 259 with revenues last year of $360 million. The neighbourhood has been a magnet for social services and low-income housing.

Even the Downtown Eastside’s most ardent supporters agree it is time to ask whether other communities need to offer more services for low-income people.

Calgary was said to have had the fastest growing homeless population in Canada until 2008, rising by 20 to 30 per cent every year because of struggling locals and out-of-towners looking for work.

Through efforts led by the Calgary Homeless Foundation, the city’s homeless numbers have since remained at the 2008 rate (about 3,500), which was achieved after a diverse group of people — CEOs from energy companies, a sports franchise owner, agencies like the United Way, and religious leaders — lobbied for and supported a 10-year plan to address homelessness in that city, said the foundation’s Andrea Ranson.

Calgary’s plan is roughly funded 70 per cent by government, and 30 per cent through a community fundraising campaign.

It follows a housing-first model, which means outreach workers visit clients where they live instead of requiring vulnerable people to come to the agencies which, like Toronto, are located throughout the city.

“When I visit our agencies, there are not a lot of clients around the buildings because the agency goes to where the clients are,” Ranson said.

But the foundation determined several years ago that its 130 social service agencies had created a “system (that) is complicated and hard to navigate, especially for those in crisis.”

In response, it adopted a tool called the Homeless Management Information System, on which details about clients are regularly collected by agencies, and then shared with other service organizations.

Ranson said Calgary non-profits also meet on a regular basis to discuss clients and determine which organization has the services to best help individual people, rather than competing for the clients. “That has changed the culture here,” she added.

While Calgary promised to end homelessness by 2018, Vancouver made an even bolder statement: to wipe out homelessness by 2015.

In June, a group of Vancouver officials with an interest in the Downtown Eastside — from the health, social services, charitable and business sectors — travelled to San Francisco to study what measures that city has taken to address homelessness. Experts say San Francisco is the North American city that most mirrors Vancouver because of its geography and the challenges for poor people created by the high cost of living and housing prices.

Among the many sites they toured, the Vancouver delegation saw the huge Delancey Street complex on San Francisco’s waterfront. It has retail stores and vocational schools on the ground floor and housing on the top three storeys, which former drug addicts, homeless people and criminals helped to build and now run.

Judy McGuire, who works at the Ray-Cam Community Centre as co-ordinator for the Inner City Safety Society, went on the trip and was wowed by the Delancey site, which she would love to see copied in Vancouver outside the Downtown Eastside.

It would take a lot of planning and buy-in from various groups, she noted, because the concept involved marginalized people living in the complex rent-free for a few years, working there, and then training new people coming in before they left.

“It is a full city block, it is right down by the water with a beautiful view. They have both a restaurant and café there, they’ve got a little art gallery. Among the most impressive things to me, it is entirely peer driven — they have no staff at all, there is no agency that oversees it, they don’t take government money,” McGuire said.

“Do I think there is potential to have some sort of therapeutic community in this area? Yes.”

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